Noam Chomsky on America: ‘This is a very racist society’

Professor Noam Chomsky said it would be “no small trick” for the Ferguson protests to turn into an anti-racism and social justice movement, considering America’s founding principles are slavery and the extermination of the indigenous population.

In a sweeping interview covering everything from Iraq and Syria
to China, capitalism, and the protests in Ferguson, MIT
linguistics professor Chomsky told GRITtv’s Laura Flanders that
events in Ferguson and the protests that have followed show how
little race relations in the United States have advanced since
the end of the Civil War.

“This is a very racist society,” Chomsky said. “It’s
pretty shocking. What’s happened to African-Americans in the last
30 years is similar to what Baptist (Edward E. Baptist in The
Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and The Making of American
Capitalism) describes happening in the late 19th Century.”

Chomsky said constitutional amendments were supposed to free
African-American slaves, which they did for about ten years.
Then, he said, a North-South compact granted former slave-owning
states the right to do whatever they wanted.

“And what they did was criminalize black life, and that
created a kind of slave force,” said Chomsky. “It threw
mostly black males into jail, where they became a perfect labor
force, much better than slaves.”

Chomsky explained that as a slave owner, the concern was keeping
the “capital” alive. When the states were able to exert
greater control over black lives, it became their responsibility
to handle strikes and disobedience. Since African-Americans
couldn’t effectively fight back against this increased state
control, Chomsky said it led to a subjugated labor force. He said
that was the backbone to the American Industrial Revolution in
the late 19th and early 20th Century, and it didn’t end until
World War II.

“After that,” Chomsky told Flanders,
“African-Americans had about two decades in which they had a
shot of entering [American] society. A black worker could get a
job in an auto plant, as the unions were still functioning, and
he could buy a small house and send his kid to college. But by
the 1970s and 1980s it’s going back to the criminalization of
black life.”

“Ronald Reagan was an extreme racist – didn’t hide it – but
the whole so-called drug war is designed, from policing to
eventual release from prison, to make it impossible for the black
male community and, more and more, women, and more and more
Hispanics to be part of [American] society,” he said.

“In fact, if you look at American history, the first slaves
came over in 1619, and that’s half a millennium. There have only
been three or four decades in which African-Americans have had a
limited degree of freedom – not entirely, but at least
some.”

Chomsky said there are some privileges for black elites, but not
for the mass of the population.

“They have been re-criminalized and turned into a slave labor
force – that’s prison labor,” Chomsky concluded. “This
is American history. To break out of that is no small
trick.”